HP has long been a leading seller of printers and is consistently at or near the top in PC sales as well. And the traditional model for printing is those two pieces of hardware working together — see the page on your PC screen and print it. But the Web and wireless technology has proven disruptive to that model. There are already a number of photo printers that can print images directly from a flash storage device – no PC needed. As Small Business Computing reports, HP is also looking at new ways to let companies print from the Web with a PC.
Hewlett-Packard has grand designs on how to radically change the laser printer, a product it brought to the mass market after Xerox invented it in the 1970s.
Following its acquisition of mobile device maker Palm, HP (NYSE: HPQ) has made no secret of its intention to take Palm’s webOS beyond the smartphone, but a business printer was probably not the first device people had in mind.
While laser printers have advanced in areas of color support and speed, some things haven’t changed, such as how to print to one. Today’s laser printers require a network connection through a PC, which in turn is connected to a network.
